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Deliver Innovation Faster Than Ever Before. Synchronous technology from Siemens PLM Software connects everyone in the product lifecycle—and it connects them all without limiting any of them. Connection without limitation. Freedom with coordination. That’s how Synchronous Technology helps you innovate more—and makes your design process up to 100 times faster.

With synchronous technology, you no longer have to choose between constraint-driven or history-free modeling. You no longer have to be a programmer to reuse a model. And you no longer need to worry about using data from multiple CAD systems.

Are you ready for the next big breakthrough in digital product development? Learn more about synchronous technology by watching the videos on the right and reading the press release below.

Practical evolution from 2D to 3D

Solid Edge removes the roadblocks to the business and productivity benefits of 3D by making the evolution significantly less expensive and easier. Using Solid Edge's simple four-step program, you can evolve from 2D to 3D design, with its inherently higher levels of productivity and corporate profitability, at a pace that makes most sense for your business. Solid Edge's four easy steps to 3D are:

Step 3 - Apply the power of the new Solid Edge hybrid 2D/3D design workflow

Step 4 - Move to full 3D design when ready

Solid Edge provides a proven set of focused tools and workflows to evolve through each of these steps as and when appropriate, while continuing to maintain the intellectual data, user education and process knowledge captured during the previous step.

Developed from the ground up with a core value of assembly centric design, Solid Edge supports both top-down and bottom up techniques, with unique tools to ensure original design intent is captured, stored and maintained throughout the complete design process.

Sheet metal design is a core capability of Solid Edge, with support for the entire design-through-fabrication process. Leveraging Synchronous Technology, sheet metal designers can develop models faster using fewer commands, make changes in real-time, edit supplier data, and take designs to production with flat patterns and automatic drawings. Solid Edge delivers the most productive sheet metal CAD package available.

With Synchronous Technology, many types of parts can be created with few or no commands. When creating deformed features, process-specific commands streamline the design of sheet metal components. As models are developed, sheet metal parts automatically adhere to these predefined material specifications such as thickness, bend radius, and corner conditions.

Models created with Synchronous Technology can be edited faster and in a more flexible manner than traditional, history-based technology. You can construct models with no constraints, but get predicable results by editing with Live Rules or applying 3D Driving Dimensions directly to a completed model. During edits, unrelated geometry will not be regenerated, giving nearly instant performance.

Solid Edge Sheet Metal excels in manufacturing support as it flattens sheet metal models, automatically calculating bends from standard or custom formulas. Flat pattern generation commands allow you to create a CAM-ready flat pattern DXF file directly from the sheet metal model, without the need to create a drawing first.

Solid Edge streamlines drawing creation with the industry’s most productive drafting system. Formed and flattened components can be detailed and dimensioned, and remain associative so they automatically update when you change your design. Innovative tools for shaded views, exploded assemblies, detail and section views, hole tables and coordinate dimensioning all ensure that you represent your parts in the best possible way for customers and manufacturing.

As designs become more complex, the number of parts in an assembly grows. It is not uncommon for Solid Edge customer assemblies to exceed 100,000 parts. Solid Edge’s large assembly technology allows you to work with large assemblies in real time. You can build and visualize digital designs, and minimize the need for costly physical prototypes.

You have full control over managing the display data, through smart selection tools such as showing just regions of parts or hiding small components. Intelligent work “zones” can also be defined, to help you focus on a specific area during assembly design.

Advanced memory management capabilities in Solid Edge loads parts only when required, which aids the creation of massive assemblies. Solid Edge is also available for 64-bit machines.

Regardless of assembly size, assemblies and components can be managed with Solid Edge Insight, built on Microsoft SharePoint, or with Teamcenter Express. These data management tools are built into Solid Edge, so files are checked in or out automatically with standard file access commands.

Solid Edge contains an unmatched set of capabilities for the 2D documentation process, with excellent drawing layout, detailing, annotation and dimensioning controls that automatically comply with the mechanical drafting standard you select.

Streamlined drawing creation

These process-specific applications take the complexity out of common engineering requirements and help you develop complete digital prototypes much more quickly than general purpose CAD modeling tools.

Solid Edge automatically creates and updates drawings from 3D models, quickly creating standard and auxiliary views, including section, detail, broken and isometric views. You can choose from a number of different display options, such as shaded, to ensure your documents communicate their intent as clearly as possible. As changes are made to parts or assemblies, associated drawings update automatically.

Solid Edge's comprehensive dimensioning and annotating tools enable you to create fully detailed drawings remarkably fast. Practical and intelligent dimensioning and annotation tools mean you can create fully dimensioned views in seconds. With Solid Edge, you have full control over every element of your drawings, so you know that they meet the requirements of organizational and international standards.

And, unlike other 3D-only products, Solid Edge lets you create 2D drawings from scratch or continue to make full use of your existing 2D legacy data. Intuitive wizards provide robust translation of existing 2D files such as AutoCAD, while 2D drafting tools not only emulate the workflows you already know but offer additional capabilities as well. Solid Edge also provides a familiar process for generating detail drawings from 2D layouts. Similar in concept to the model and paper space methodology in other 2D products, you develop 2D layouts at 1:1 scale and then create multiple detail views of the layout on separate drawing sheets. Each view can be scaled as required, while still maintaining correct dimensions and annotations. Any changes to the original 2D layout are automatically reflected in the detail views.

Documenting the largest assemblies

Solid Edge dramatically accelerates the production of assembly drawings by automatically creating exploded views, balloons, parts lists and bills of material for models of any size. Solid Edge customers are routinely creating and documenting massive assemblies, taking advantage of innovative management techniques for drawing view generation. You can place drawing views based on a search query and turn off all the components that are not essential for the purpose of the view. With significantly fewer hidden lines to calculate, drawing views can be placed and updated much faster. It's just one of many tools that will reduce the time you spend creating and updating your assembly drawings.

Solid Edge tracks drawing changes that result from alterations of the 3D model, eliminating the need for manual checking. Prominent visual cues signal when drawing views and annotations are out of date and instructions direct the designer to find and amend potential drawing errors.

Drawing automation with Quicksheet templates

Many manufacturing companies have standards for creating drawings, or common assemblies that require similar drawings to be made of each unique configuration. Using Quicksheet templates in Solid Edge, you can eliminate repetitive tasks by pre-defining a drawing layout and creating new drawings by simply dragging a different part or assembly into the template. All views then re-compute to create the new drawing, including any derived views such as sections or detail view, as well as parts lists and auto balloons.

Solid Edge is designed to promote improved collaboration within and between design teams, across departments, and with external contributors (such as suppliers and customers).

Improved Collaboration for Your Design Teams

Solid Edge Insight™ supports transparent completion of design data management tasks for designers working in Solid Edge. Designers can see if other design team members check-out any of the components that they are referencing, and can check-in updated parts when needed.

Improved Collaboration between Your Departments

Solid Edge Insight takes advantage of the tasks and workflow management capabilities of Microsoft SharePoint, enabling all users to see the status of design tasks and projects.

Improved Collaboration with Suppliers and Customers

Solid Edge with Synchronous Technology allows data from other CAD applications to be imported and directly edited, enabling you to rapidly incorporate third party design intelligence into your design process.

Suppliers and customers can also use the no-cost, downloadable XpresReview tool to view, analyze and markup Solid Edge parts, assemblies and drawings, helping design reviews to be completed quickly and accurately.

Improved Collaboration with Teamcenter

The Solid Edge Embedded Client (SEEC) enables design information created in Solid Edge to be captured, controlled and shared in the cPDM environments of Teamcenter and Teamcenter Express.